LG V20 Sprint LS997 Initial Impression

 

 

Being not impressed with my Galaxy S7, I broke down to order yet another sprint locked phone… This time being the LG V20. I’m a long time LG user despite some unfortunate history with this brand, a low-end Optimus L9 dead in 6mo, and a LG G4 dead with infamous bootloop. Besides these, my other LG G Flex survived and still being used as of this writing. (The nexus 5X built by LG being a recent purchase, not sure how long it will last). I always loved LG software. Especially the wireless storage app, which allows as a samba network device. But unfortunately, this app was removed after Android 4.4. And I have yet to find a replacement for that. Although there are quite a few samba apps on Play Store, all of them require some special kernal which are hard to get by. 

 

 

Before going into the phone impression, let me talk about registration with Sprint MVNO network. My experience with sprint network has been fine contrary to what the internet is saying. Also as long as the phones are sprint locked, joining any MVNO network seems to be smooth, the financial eligibility requirement seems not being affected. I have transferred two LG Volt from Ringplus to tello. I replaced one of them with the GS7 sprint locked version with no issue. I registered a Verizon iphone 6 plus with Ringplus, then ported the number out to google voice. After using AT&T for three month, then registered the phone with tello. This time I registered this LG V20 on Ting. There are about 7 different sim cards for Sprint, as long as you get the right sim card, it should be easy to register the phone onto sprint network. From my understanding, the MEID is used for phone and text, and ICC ID is used for data connection. This LG V20 currently has a ZV5 firmware, which is the last version to support flashing Dirty Santa to unlock bootloader, and sim unlock as a side effect.

   

 

Now back to the phone, all I can say is that the phone is a beast. The always on secondary screen is fully customizable, and very useful. Unlike the GS7 always on screen which drains battery drastically, the secondary screen on V20 barely affects battery performance. And you can even set timer to turn it on and off at your specified time.

 

 

The general battery performance seems to be a little better than G4 since the Sprint firmware has less junk apps built in than the Verizon G4. The standby battery performance is excellent.

 

 

Being a more recent release than GS7, V20 came with the USB-C port. The three size when compared to Oneplus 3 isn’t that big either. The weight though is significantly heavier. The back cover is so slippery that it almost feels like holding a soap in hand. A case is mandatory for this device. The back cover is very easy to open with the provided eject button. The battery at 3200mAh is relatively small compared to other phones with the screen size. But so far the battery performance is decent.

 

 

The most interesting features of the phone are 1. Hi-Fi Quad DAC 2. Dual camera with regular and wide angle lens. I played around with the Hi-Fi Quad DAC with a pair of SONY MDR-7506 and Neutron music player. The sound is very good although the background noise is a bit high. Neutron runs quite stable on this device unlike on G4 it crashed a lot. There is still occasional stuttering when streaming from NAS with high bitrate Hi-Res FLAC files though. It almost made me regret getting the SONY NW-A35HN Hi-Res Walkman.

 

For the dual camera, I don’t think it uses software to simulate the bokeh effect. The two cameras work on their own. I haven’t got too much chance to test out the capability.

SONY Walkman NW-M505 Review – aptX demystified

 

 

So I’ve been stop updating this blog for the past two years now… I had to take a break and eventually got into photography for a bit. I’m trying to revive it by posting a new review here. But I don’t think I’ll update it that frequently afterwards. So this review is about the SONY Walkman M Series, NW-M505. It’s sold in Japan only, released about 11 months ago.

 

 

 

It’s a unique entry into SONY’s Walkman line-up since it blends the smartphone function - Bluetooth adapter into the product. The key features are S-Master MX digital amp, active noise cancelling, and Bluetooth with aptX codec within a tiny body. You can view it as an upgrade to the MW1 I reviewed, but it’s designed by SONY Walkman department instead of their mobile department. Sine it’s a Walkman in nature, it lacks the fancy notification that’s available in MW1, it doesn’t require SONY connect app. It does show phone number when Bluetooth is connected though, not caller ID, just phone number. It comes with a built-in 16GB internal memory, but doesn’t support microSD cards. Being equipped with S-Master MX digital amp with a bumped up 10mw+10mw stereo output, it’s a solid entry into the Walkman series. The small size does mean SONY has to compromise a bit here, particularly on the battery life. For pure MP3 playback, it can last as long as 15 hours with active noise cancelling off. But with all the fancy bells and whistles (wav playback, Bluetooth), it only lasts 9 hours max. It doesn’t support FLAC playback either. It has no high-RES playback either, all formats including wave, atrac, aac, wma, mp3 support upto 48Khz ONLY.

 

 

 

 

The sides: the design goes back to their classic E400/500/A600 series where changing songs require the twisting of the “shuttle switch” instead of physical button. Pull out the “shuttle switch” allows quick changing folders. Under FM, it manually searches for radio station. But instead of pushing in to lock the device, it gives a dedicated HOLD button. The volume rocker has a indentation for blind operation. Long twisting the shuttle switch also jump the song in 10sec interval, works both in music and bluetooth mode.

 

 

Long pressing the “HOME-Back” button will take you back to the top function, highlight “MUSIC” function. The device’s interface is nicely layed out with three basic functions: MUSIC, Bluetooth, FM, and lastly settings.

 

 

On the front is a SONY logo, underneath is the MIC, standard for Bluetooth communication. A tiny screen with upto three lines, and a call/play/pause button. The screen is very DIM, even with the highest setting, it’s pretty much invisible under direct sunlight.

 

 

On the back is the hole for clip mounting or neck strap, and NFC. The included clip is poorly made of cheap plastic, it has very weak clipping force, attaching it to the device just destroys the aesthetic. So I opted to use a neck strap. But this device only weighs 40g, it bumps everywhere when you start walking/run fast… The NFC is a gimmicky at best, it requires you to install easy connect app. But how hard is to connect Bluetooth manually…

 

 

Overall it’s a very nice looking device, other colors black, white, pink are available aside from the violet I chose here. I just wish it has a dedicated repeat/shuffle button. The mounting could really improve here, at least provide BOTH options for mounting AND neck strap at the same time. Maybe they are just trying to sell the soft case…

 

 

The audio quality is pretty good, both the mp3 mode and the Bluetooth mode. This is actually my first serious mp3 player. I use the mp3 mode for about 80% of the time now, and loaded the device with mostly 320K mp3 and wav files. The audio has very clean background. It has good dynamic range. It provides software enhancements such as clear bass and clear phase to further process the sound.

 

 

For the equalizer, it included a few, plus two customizable slots. The EQ includes clear bass plus five bands, total of six possible adjustments. For the clear phase, I believe you have to enable the noise cancelling function to use it.

 

 

Now onto the active noise cancelling function. The device includes MDR-NC31 noise cancelling earphone. It’s a short one with an extension cable. The biggest difference is the four pin, as seen on the above pictures. Left is the regular plug with two pins, middle is the one with remote control/MIC with three pins. but the NC31 has four pins. The same earphone is included with SONY’s Z2 smartphone for the same noise cancelling purpose.

 

 

The noise cancelling can filter noises from bus, airplane, and indoor. I’ve only used the bus setting, and it’s extremely effective in blocking the noises. I even missed a bus stop once… SONY claims the noise cancelling can filter out 98% of the background noise.

 

 

 

The device also supports other SONY noise cancelling earphone/headphones. If you select other headphone, you lose the noise cancelling function. And the sound stage is not as wide as the ones with noise cancelling for some reason. So I always default to the included earphone even if it has no noise cancelling ability…

 

 

The device uses the standard microUSB port for charging and transferring music. The charger is not included, only a microUSB cable is included. It is NOT possible to operate the device while charging. It takes about three hours for it to fully charge. If you connect it to a PC for transferring music, it starts charging automatically. The battery display on the device is extremely inaccurate. Four bars are shown. But the first bar took forever to drain. If your first bar is gone, it means that you have less than 50% of battery left!

 

 

I spent very little time with the FM. The S Master MX digital amp does NOT work in this mode. It has bands from 76Mhz to 108Mhz, so should be good for most of the world. You can auto search and store the radio stations.

 

 

Now onto the second part of the review, the Bluetooth performance and how to utilize the aptX codec. First thing is that there’s no annoying blue LED that’s found on every single Bluetooth device, I’m not sure how SONY got away with that, but I’m extremely happy with this!

 

 

The M505 is SONY’s first aptX enabled adapter. Although currently SONY has the SBH20, SBH52, MW1 pro, MW1 Lite, all made by the mobile department, none of these adapters are aptX capable. To enable the aptX codec, both your source (smartphone, tablet, PC) needs to have aptX support, and the receiver must the support as well. Unfortunately I don’t have a smartphone with aptX enabled. So I bought a USB Bluetooth 4.0 dongle and tested it on PC.

 

 

Left is the Samsung HS3000, and I’ve been using this adapter for the past two years. It works fine, but the sound quality isn’t that great. My normal usage scenario is that I would hook up these adapters to my car stereo, and play music, answer phones handsfree in the car. Even under the SBC transmission, M505 blows the HS3000 away. It has way more sound separation. The sound is much clear.

 

 

I paired the M505 with a couple devices, but the main device is my cellphone – sony Xperia ION. I’m using poweramp as the main player. I was able to sync the song title, artist to the M505 by change a setting in poweramp. The only thing it doesn’t sync is the timeline, but by long twisting the shuttle switch, you can still fastforward or back 10 sec interval.

 

 

To test it on PC, you would need a dongle that has CSR 8510 chip inside. CSR is the company that develops and licenses this aptX technology. I got a generic one just to try the aptX out. To be honest, there is very little incentive to use Bluetooth on PC since portability most of the time is no concern.

 

 

There are different Bluetooth software called stack you can install. Among them are Microsoft, Toshiba, Widcomm etc. Different stacks have different implementations on Bluetooth, support for profiles could also be vastly different. What you need for the CSR 8510 chip is the one straight from CSR. You can download it HERE.

 

 

 

This is what looks like after installing the CSR driver. I disabled my original Bluetooth 3.0 dongle with the Microsoft stack. Make sure you reboot PC after installing the driver!

 

 

 

 

To enable aptX, both the transmitter and the PC has to put into the “Priority on sound quality”. This increases the power for transmission, also shortens the transmission distance vastly. Under aptX mode, you are limited in a 5-10m range instead of the normal upto 30m range. Behind wall is also a big NO NO.

 

 

After successfully pairing the device, you’ll see a very brief prompt for confirming aptX connection is established. The prompt is so brief, less than one second, that I don’t think you will even notice… This is ALWAYS a confusing part that users don’t have idea whether they got the aptX connection or not. As for the actual audio quality, I don’t hear much difference between aptX and SBC… When I got a new smartphone with aptX support, maybe I’ll be more willing to do the test again. But right now, I’m not so impressed with it.

 

 

I think the SONY Gold wireless headset is a way better choice for wireless listening. The dongle paired with the headset offers very intuitive operation, the sound quality is decent, the headset is comfort for wearing for one hour or two. Most important is that the USB dongle is plug and play, you can forget about the Bluetooth driver nonsense.

 

 

  

 

The USB Bluetooth 4.0 dongle has the annoying blue LED. If you put the laptop into sleep mode, the LED by default will still shining, which means the dongle is consuming energy. To put the dongle into sleep mode as well, you can change the power management option from the device manager.

 

 

Above is a disassembled picture showing the internals of the M505.

 

So to summarize the review, here are some pros and cons of the device:

 

Pros:

1. Small size, portable, attractive design

2. Good audio quality on both local and Bluetooth playback

3. Noise cancelling very effective

4. aptX support (need a smartphone to fully test it)

5. MicroUSB for data and charging

6. Bluetooth connection is stable

 

Cons:

1. Small LED screen, poor outdoor visibility

2. Poor battery life (10hr on mixed use), inaccurate battery status

3. Not operational when charging, took 3 hours to fully recharge

4. Shuffle, repeat has no dedicated button, buries under the menu

5. Poorly made mounting clip, weak clipping force 

PS3 firmware 3.55->3.56->3.60->3.61->3.65->3.66 Nothing but Security Patches!

Haven’t updated for the firmware for quite some time, but nothing notable new features have been introduced since 3.55, because SONY has been busy combating with hackers. But thanks to that we all get some free games.

3.55 and 3.56 are pure security patches to disable jailbreak.

3.60 adds online storage (manual) and controller save setting.

3.61 forces user the PSN login password after the infamous hacking which caused the network down for almost two month.

3.65 and 3.66 are security patches as well. 3.65 is not mandatory, while 3.66 is, not sure what new has been added.

PS3 firmware 3.30 - Bitstream (Mix) detailed explanation

 

Well, I haven’t kept up-to-date with the PS3 firmware recently, this one is added retrospectively.

Firmware 3.30 was released on Apr 22, 2010, and the major updates are support for 3D gaming and a hidden feature: Bitstream (Mix) option for people who are still using optical out with a legacy ac3/DTS receiver.

The most basic feature for Bitstream (Mix) is to provide full sound for button click and PIP secondary audio. But there’s more to it, the most beneficial thing is the ability to playback LPCM 5.1 tracks encoded in DTS 5.1 in real time. Before this update, you will never get the surround sound out of LPCM 5.1 since optical output is only capable of 2 channel LPCM, but now you will at least get the 5.1 full information. This is equivalent to the “Auto mix based on source audio” option provided in Totalmedia Theatre 3 long time ago.

PowerDVD has also provided such mixing, but it’s only limited to AC3/DTS mixing.

“Auto mix based on source audio” is a more elegant way to mix the surround sound, it differs from just AC3/DTS mixing which just lumps all audios into ac3 or DTS.

These are the behaviors I have observed:

For any 1 channel sources:

Always expands to LPCM 2.0

For any 2 channel sources:

LPCM 2.0 - decodes/retains to LPCM 2.0*
Dolby TrueHD 2.0 - decodes to LPCM 2.0
DTS-HD MA 2.0 - decodes to LPCM 2.0

(while if AC3/DTS mixing is chosen in PowerDVD or TMT3/5, these audio will be mixed into ac3 2.0 or DTS 2.0 regardless)

For the LPCM 2.0 source here, I’m not sure what PS3 exactly did, since in LPCM mode, the button sound can be heard regardless if it’s decoded or in original form. I’m guessing it’s more likely to retain the LPCM 2.0 rather than decoding for simplicity, but I could be wrong.

For any 5.1 channel sources:

LPCM 5.1 - compresses as DTS 5.1 and bitstreaming in real time (biggest benefit)
Dolby TrueHD 5.1 - compresses as Dolby Digital 5.1 and bitstreaming in real time
DTS-HD MA 5.1 - compresses as DTS 5.1 and bitstreaming in real time

Any button sound and PIP secondary audio will be mixed in.

I believe for audio more than 5.1 channels, they will be downmixed to 5.1, then compressed and bitstreamed as well. as for why Dolby TrueHD goes to Dolby Digital rather than DTS which is what I preferred, I think it maybe due to a license constraint? Also I have no way to determine what kind of bitrate these streams are compressed into. As far as the sound quality goes, you NEED to increase the volume a lot to get the same level of the audio in its original form. I think the sound is a little bit inferior to the Bitstream (direct) mode, especially the bass sounds a little mushy.

PS3 firmware 3.50 adds incomplete 3DBD playback

 

In Sept 2010, Sony released firmware 3.50 to add 3DBD playback (profile 5.0). But due to the limitation of the hardware, we are really only getting “4.5” features. Here is my attempt to explain in details from an authoring standpoint of view.

In order to play 3DBD, you need an HD 3D display, active 3D glasses, and a high-speed HDMI cable (for PS3, you only need 1.3b since it doesn’t support 1.4a standards, maybe we can get an upgrade like the switch from fat to slim models which adds HD audio bitstreaming?)

Here are some Limitations on Blu-ray 3D™ disc playback from Sony:

• The 3D display of some elements such as menus and subtitles may be different on the PS3™ system than on other 3D playback devices.
  • When Dolby TrueHD is selected as the audio format, audio will be output in Dolby Digital during playback of Blu-ray 3D™ content.
  • When DTS-HD is selected as the audio format, audio will be output in DTS during playback of Blu-ray 3D™ content.

These are due to the PS3 has to focusing on decoding two 1080p HD streams simultaneously, it lacks the power to do any BD-J application and HD audio at the same time. This is only a PS3 limitation, the real profile 5.0 machines can do BD-J AND HD audio. In HDMV mode, the menu system doesn’t support real 3D “pop” visual effect, you can do 2D+z-depth value. Under HDMV mode, you can do upto 32 streams containing the z-depth. Sonic uses OSF format to include the parameters, the values can be accurate to frames. I believe sonic currently does NOT have a solution to create real 3D menus. The 2D can still be done in photoshop+designer PS plugin.

• Depending on the content, some BD-J (Blu-ray Disc™ Java*) features such as BONUSVIEW™ and BD-Live™ may not play in 3D or may not function properly on the PS3™ system.

Under profile 5.0 mode where you’re playing 3D titles, you don’t get PIP, multi-angle and BD-Live. But you’re getting a considerable performance gain. The menus get double amount of memory, which I assume to be 32mb for HDMV and 96mb for BD-J? The max bitrate increases from 48Mbps to 72Mbps. The MVC streams used can only be 1080p23.976, 720p60, and 720p59.94, no other combinations are allowed. In Scenarist BD, MVC have base and dependent clips. The base is the main stream, dependent clip is added as a subpath, kind of like PIP. The base can be used as a pure 2D playlist, the feature was disable in 5.5, but was later added back in 5.5.1. (I’m not sure why some retail disc has separate 2D and 3D discs…) The dependent information is the difference from the base, it is usually 50% of the size of the base. There are no I-frames in dependent stream. The dependent stream is put under the SSIF folder. Scenarist BD has a convenient feature where it can automatically generate 3D playlist using base and dependent stream (under a folder) without adding subpath manually. There are some extended PSR values to check 3D capability only available in profile 5.0 mode. I think someone said the SSIF structure uses a linux file system, that’s why under windows, we are getting double the size if we store the disc in folders, therefore it’s definitely recommended to store the disc in ISOs. When outputting a testing disc using Scenarist BD 5.5x, you’ll need to remove AACS in CPS unit, and using premastering - CMF to mux. Thre will be a ud.dat file under Dst0 folder, rename the ud.dat to ud.iso and burn. You can’t do fake AVCHD for 3DBD. These are the information I have gathered so far.

PS3 firmware 3.21->3.42->3.55 Sony desperately trying to prevent cracking the system, but only proved to be futile

 

I lumped these 3 firmwares into one since they pretty much are just security patches.

Firmware 3.21 was introduced on April fool’s day 2010. It was THE infamous patch that REMOVES the install otherOS feature. This also pretty much started the long battle with preventing the system from being cracked. But it only catalyzes the progress IMO since four month after, we’re greeted by some Australian vendor selling USB jailbreak device. There the firmware 3.42 was released for solely defeating this device. Not too long ago, PS3 downgrader was introduced which can be used to downgrade current firmware to lower versions to allow jailbreaking the system. And for defeating this, Sony released firmware 3.55. But shortly after Geohot the original hacker who is pretty much responsible of the removing of install otherOS feature came back with releasing PS3’s master key, which marks the day that PS3 system is totally cracked.

BD Live / Playstation 3 FW 2.50/2.52 / Live with PlayStation / Home Beta

 

Ehh, a bunch of stuff here... First have to mention that  Playstation 3 has been on fw 2.50/2.52 for about a month now, never got around to post some screenshots for this update... Quite a few features have been added, but it doesn't have big impact on home theatre area, therefore I'm not bothered with this update.

Two big features in this updates are:
1. You can now turn off PS3 or the controller within a designated period time: 10 min, 20 min, etc
2. Video can now played sequentially, and quick scene access has been added.

So much for the firmware, then move on to live with playstation, it's the new version of folding@home, it added the ability to access google news. Other than that, it's the same as the older version, but somehow I cannot see molecule folding now...

Next is the home beta, got it on my PS3 yesterday. After experiencing it with 1 night, I think it's utterly crap... First if you use component cable, you're screwed with 480p only. Then it asks for 3G of space... After going into the home beta, I found that it's just a virtual community, kind of like the one on wii. You can currently access four places (mall, home theatre, bowling, central plaza) outside of your home, and none of these are really appealing or even functioning; stores in mall don't seem open yet, home theatre - you got to watch socom free video, the same video all day long, and not to mention the subpar video quality, bowling - you can play some small games, all generic games just to wasting your time, and central plaza has nothing going on unless you want to socialize with people. Basically, home is just a big advertisement environment for SONY.

And lastly, yesterday afternoon, I just experienced BD Live, which is another disappointing experience. I got Kung fu Panda from paramount, and Wall-E from Disney. These are the two big animation features from summer this year. I watched Wall-E first, which turned out to be mediocre at the best, better than cars and the incredibles. (forgot to mention that upon inserting the disc, it wants to download a 21MB update... I think it's mandatory, so if you don't have Internet, you might be not able to watch the disc, at least for BD Live machines??) As for the BD live Disney provided, you have to go to www.disneybdlive.com to register first, which is so hard to register, took me about half an hour to finally go thru, turns out that I have a bad screen name... After registering, I found nothing interest... Plus using a remote control chatting? Way too absurd! Next, I watched Kung fu Panda, which turns out to be a way better movie. As the BD live features, it's a lot easier to use, you don't need to register... It's more like what they provided on HD-DVD. You download some content to your local storage, then view it. Currently there are only two features, and the downloads are so small, less than 2MB, which wonders me why the f*ck they just include all the stuff on the disc, it's pointless to download!!!

PS3 firmware 3.40/3.41 (ver.2) and Video Editor & Uploader

 

Trying to keep up on the PS3 updates here… So 3.40 adds Video Editor & Uploader application which allows some basic editing for the video on the hard drive and upload to youtube. 3.40 also adds support for PSN+ support. And maybe 3D?

Here’s some quick review on the Video Editor & Uploader application:

Pros:

1. Supports even Blu-ray m2ts files, somewhat better handling than Sony Vegas…
2. Easy to use, intuitive interface.
3. Pretty fast encoding (2min footage took less than 10min).
4. Easy uploading process to youtube

Cons:

1. Videos copied on HDD before 3.40 cannot be edited.
2. Function too simple, pretty much just trimming footage, and very simple text effects.
3. No HD output, only 640*480 SD resolution.

Version 3.41 is a very minor update to include the support for recommendations in PSN downloading. And yet SONY screws up. I think if you change your HDD after the update, your firmware will be corrupted. They have issued a new update, but still the same version 3.41, a bit confusing IMO.

Thoughts on PS3 firmware 3.00-3.15

 

Ehh, this is a long due post… Thought I’ve been catching every single firmware updates ever since I got this machine, so it’s good to keep the tradition going. But this is gonna be short since I really don’t feel there’s much change in terms of video playback in these updates: 3.00->3.01->3.10->3.15…

I’ve already forgot the main features since 3.00, but I’ll try my best here:

1. Dynamic background
2. Playstation store access shortcuts from the video and game icon
3. Multiple audio/subtitles in PSN store (never seen it implemented on any of the video…)
4. Disable fake DS3
5. Simultaneous audio output (the only useful function…)
6. upconversion on audio files to higher bit depth if AVR supports, but disables doing other tasks
7. Annoying status bar on the top right hand corner that you can’t disable

That’s pretty much it.

3.01 is a small patch to fix some broken game titles.

3.10 adds facebook support.

3.15 adds the ability of transfer files from old PS3 to new PS3 across the network.

I think that’s pretty all the stuff I remembered… Not too much is going on really…

PS3 FW 2.70 + tversity 1.5 report

 

Long time no update here. I’ve been busy playing that Valkyria Chronicles game and modifying a couple DVDs that I’ve always wanted to do. So now that portion of tasks have been finished, I’m back on track with my blog.

PS3 had a seemingly uninteresting update last month, at least all the updates are none video/audio improvements related. However, this update is pretty big to anyone who wish to play some Asian (mainly Japan and Korea) HDTV files. The update now enables to play 1920*1080i mpeg2 with 5.1 aac audio. Previously, PS3 will report unsupported format with this particular combination (no problem with 1920*1080i mpeg2 with 2.0 aac or 1440*1080i mpeg2 with 5.1 aac). This of course applies only to US firmware, I think the PS3 Asian firmware has long supported this format from the very start.

Next is the new version of tversity. With the latest version, I suddenly found out that I’m able to play menus under Blu-ray structure via DNLA streaming. Previously PS3 sees these as 10:00 clip, and will report unsupported format. Now PS3 still displays the same, but they can be played. And of course the menus are shown without any button highlights, and they are not functional.

FUN Video Port spec / PS3 firmware v2.60

 

Funi has their own video site, there they hosted several show in either dub or sub form (mostly sub, some has dub and both). In principal, you can only view these videos online for FREE, if you ever want to own it, you need to pay $1.99 for each episode in wmv format (not sure about the spec). But apparently bitcomet can download them in flv format for FREE (spec as below)… Never a huge fan of FUNi, but I would only recommend doing this only if the connection is slow or want to watch the videos without internet. After viewing, you should delete them… (the quality isn’t particular good that you want to store it anyway…)

General
Complete name             : L:[FUNi]Gunslinger Girls 2[FUNi]Gunslinger Girl 2 - ep01.flv
Format                          : Flash Video
File size                         : 204 MiB
Duration                        : 25mn 18s
Overall bit rate               : 1 126 Kbps

Video
Format                           : VP6
Duration                         : 25mn 17s
Bit rate                           : 1 000 Kbps
Width                             : 640 pixels
Height                            : 360 pixels
Display aspect ratio         : 16/9
Frame rate                      : 23.976 fps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)           : 0.181

Audio
Format                           : MPEG Audio
Format version                : Version 1
Format profile                  : Layer 3
Duration                          : 25mn 18s
Bit rate mode                   : Constant
Bit rate                            : 128 Kbps
Channel(s)                       : 2 channels
Sampling rate                   : 44.1 KHz
Resolution                        : 16 bits

The picture quality is actually NOT too bad for casual view, the average bitrate 1000kbps is good enough to support the relatively low resolution. But it’s still not as good as some experienced fansub’s work (for the same file size with a good RAW). It seems that this VP6 codec used here is NOT as efficient as xvid or x.264, probably due to its design for online streaming. The bitrate seems constant, fast scenes suffer pixelation, smearing, and a few scenes have banding. But it’s still better than youtube’s high quality setting. And for the playback, VLC is recommended. I tried MPC and KMP, the two suffered bottom smearing, not sure why though, while VLC almost doesn’t exhibit this problem. The audio quality is more than sufficient though, FUNi put mostly 192K(new half season sets) or 256K(old singles) on their DVDs.

sample images:

Rico is even more evil in this sequel…

This one isn’t as good as the original done by Madhouse, but it’s still decent enough, at least on par with Noir. As by someone who got the one piece Blu-ray by FUNi, apparently FUNi has plan to put the original series on Blu-ray (along with Blue Gender). If that day comes, I’ll be happily enough to double dip (if it’s a good upgrade over the crappy quality on DVD now) since the original series is just so good (already have the original boxset with cloth scroll on wall right in front of me!).

Next info is PS3 firmware v2.60 which was released two weeks ago.

Not too much function has been added in this release. Divx 3.11 is now supported, and a new photo viewing application was provided for optional installation. I won’t take pictures again this time since I am lazy…

BD Live / Playstation 3 FW 2.50/2.52 / Live with PlayStation / Home Beta

 

Ehh, a bunch of stuff here... First have to mention that  Playstation 3 has been on fw 2.50/2.52 for about a month now, never got around to post some screenshots for this update... Quite a few features have been added, but it doesn't have big impact on home theatre area, therefore I'm not bothered with this update.

Two big features in this updates are:
1. You can now turn off PS3 or the controller within a designated period time: 10 min, 20 min, etc
2. Video can now played sequentially, and quick scene access has been added.

So much for the firmware, then move on to live with playstation, it's the new version of folding@home, it added the ability to access google news. Other than that, it's the same as the older version, but somehow I cannot see molecule folding now...

Next is the home beta, got it on my PS3 yesterday. After experiencing it with 1 night, I think it's utterly crap... First if you use component cable, you're screwed with 480p only. Then it asks for 3G of space... After going into the home beta, I found that it's just a virtual community, kind of like the one on wii. You can currently access four places (mall, home theatre, bowling, central plaza) outside of your home, and none of these are really appealing or even functioning; stores in mall don't seem open yet, home theatre - you got to watch socom free video, the same video all day long, and not to mention the subpar video quality, bowling - you can play some small games, all generic games just to wasting your time, and central plaza has nothing going on unless you want to socialize with people. Basically, home is just a big advertisement environment for SONY.

And lastly, yesterday afternoon, I just experienced BD Live, which is another disappointing experience. I got Kung fu Panda from paramount, and Wall-E from Disney. These are the two big animation features from summer this year. I watched Wall-E first, which turned out to be mediocre at the best, better than cars and the incredibles. (forgot to mention that upon inserting the disc, it wants to download a 21MB update... I think it's mandatory, so if you don't have Internet, you might be not able to watch the disc, at least for BD Live machines??) As for the BD live Disney provided, you have to go to www.disneybdlive.com to register first, which is so hard to register, took me about half an hour to finally go thru, turns out that I have a bad screen name... After registering, I found nothing interest... Plus using a remote control chatting? Way too absurd! Next, I watched Kung fu Panda, which turns out to be a way better movie. As the BD live features, it's a lot easier to use, you don't need to register... It's more like what they provided on HD-DVD. You download some content to your local storage, then view it. Currently there are only two features, and the downloads are so small, less than 2MB, which wonders me why the f*ck they just include all the stuff on the disc, it's pointless to download!!!

Playstation 3 firmware 2.4x

 

I should've updated this piece of news last month, but I've taken shity quality pictures for the last couple of batches. So I don't have good pictures, I'm hesitent post them...

This firmware 2.40 was initially released at the end of June, but was pulled off a day later due to the firmware bricked a few PS3s during the update. The problem was caused by users with too many files on their hard drives. I was glad that I didn't update that firmware, as I might be a victim of that since I have tons of files, pictures, mp3s, trailers, game demos, etc on the hard drive... After about a week later, an updated version 2.41 was released, and solved the problem. About a week ago, there's another firmware 2.42 released.

Most of the features in this update are useless in terms of media playing back. However, there are three minor updates in terms of media playing back.

1. Frame and Block Noise Reduction, upconversion in all videos:

Also, there's upconversion feature for BDAV discs now. It is another useless feature as we don't have Blu-ray recorders on the market right now...

2. Mini-size control panel for music:

This is another useless feature...

3. DTS-ES and DTS 96/24 for DVD-Video and DTS-ES Matrix for Blu-ray Discs are now supported.

This is a big update for people using HDMI port and have PS3 doing internal decoding, but not a huge deal for people with optical connection...

One neat feature in this update is including a "Turn Off System" button:

Now I can finally use my SONY RM-AX1400 remote control paired with Nyko PS3 dongle to turn off the system without using the PS3 BT remote.

Other updates are game related which includes accessing XMB during game and trophies.

XMB accessing during game is a long waited update by many gamers, and now it works, but somewhat slow. The operation is not sluggish, but does take some time refreshing the icons. I hope there will be more improvement, better allocating resources for later updates.